


Salome

by okapi



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Anal Sex, Dirty Talk, Discussion of Intimacy, Feels, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Intimacy, M/M, Oral Sex, Oscar Wilde - Freeform, Premature Ejaculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-09-28 13:44:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10107137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi
Summary: Paris 1896. Holmes & Watson attend the premiere of Oscar Wilde'sSalome.





	1. Starry, Starry Night

“The language did not put you off, Watson?”

“Not at all.”

“Then your French is better than that of the translator.”

“It helped that a friend leant me his copy of the play in English to read on the crossing.”

“A friend with scandalous taste in literature is always helpful.”

I sighed. “The playwright might or might not agree. Speaking of the translator, though, do you know what he said about Wilde’s dedication, rather than their sharing of the title page as authors?”

“Something vain, no doubt.”

“He called it ‘the difference between a tribute of admiration from an artist and a receipt from a tradesman.’"

Holmes stopped, then turned back towards me; his face, or rather the part of it not hidden behind winter’s accoutrement, was drawn and his voice, even allowing for the soft wool muffler, was uncommonly thick.

“Watson.”

At the word, I, too, longed to speak my heart, but the starry Parisian night was not dark enough for either of us.

“Drink?” he croaked.

I could only nod.

* * *

We found a café.

“The playwright and the translator,” said Holmes when we were unbundled and seated at a small table with our hands wrapped around cups of spirit-fortified coffee. “Theirs is not an association I envy.”

“Talented but volatile, immature.”

“Reckless.”

“Criminally so,” I added with a frown.

We kept silent company with our own thoughts and our own cups until I looked up and decided to unburden myself.

“Holmes, even without a dedication page, my every written word is tribute to you, your work and your art.”

The shadows that hid us so beautifully from the world also obscured us from each other, and despite our nearness, I strained to read his expression. His impassioned reply, however, assuaged my fear.

“My name shines on every page, Watson. A dedication would be both meretricious and in poor taste, and the latter is much beyond and beneath you. You are an artist as well as a master of your trade, my dear man, that singular trade of making a legend out of a somewhat ridiculous human being. Payment for services rendered, I fear, would bankrupt the very coffers your chronicles have served to enrich.”

“To enrich and to enjoy. This Parisian holiday is shaping up to be a fine one.”

“It is, isn’t it? Last summer…”

My eyebrows rose. I leaned closer.

Until then, neither of us had spoken of last summer aloud. We’d fled London for one of England’s university towns not only to escape the dust and disruption of some much-needed refurbishing of our rooms, but also to distance ourselves from the trial of Oscar Wilde, his being a crime that Holmes and I were also guilty of committing.

And though our flight had seemed justified then, the decision did not rest easy with me now, and when Holmes proposed a visit to Paris to attend the premiere of Wilde’s _Salome_ , while the playwright himself was still serving his sentence back in England, I readily agreed, as tribute, act of solidarity, and apology for cowardice.

Holmes studied the contents of his cup. He did not finish his statement.

As I drank, he did, too, then asked politely,

“How did you find the play, Watson?”

I leaned back in my chair and eyed my cup thoughtfully. “Lovely. It had a poetry that appealed strongly.”

“Musical, I agree.” His gaze drifted from his cup to mine. He licked his lips, then spoke in an unusually rushed, hushed, and breathy tone,

“I am wicked, Watson. At this moment, I am sorely tempted to take up your hand and kiss your fingers and palm and your wrist, not only to taste your skin, but also to reassure myself that your pulse flutters as mine does. I am tempted to do so in front of gods and prophets and kings and all my fellow sinners in this wretched establishment. Reckless.” He spat the final word with disgust.

I leaned forward once more and, beneath the table, touched the side of my knee to his. The act was one employed on rare occasion in hansom cabs when the urge for physical contact with him, no matter how fleeting or perfunctory, overwhelmed me.

Holmes started, but did not draw back.

“I am reckless, too,” I said.

Holmes shook his head. “Reckless would be to take your well-kissed hand and place it on the front of my trousers, making my painful condition painfully obvious even to someone as unobservant as you, my dear, dear man.”

For a moment, I could neither breathe nor think, not even to feel a pang at the anguish that contorted Holmes’s features. His words had stolen all the air from the room, indeed, all the air from my very lungs.

Never before had he spoke thusly in public. The café was dark, and our corner of it even darker, but the novelty of his utterance still stunned—and stirred me to similar unprecedented boldness.

“You would not be in pain for very long, Holmes. I’ve sworn an oath to ease suffering.”

He looked at me and what a thing of beauty it was to watch the last traces of shame driven from his visage. A youthful smile tugged at his lips.

“You've reduce a grown man to school boy filth and fumbling, Watson.”

“I’m quite certain you charmed even as a young man, Holmes.” I paused for a quick, bracing gulp of the bitter brew at hand. “But if I stood and put this table beneath me and, before your gods and your prophets and your kings, spread your gorgeous lips with my own hardened prick, there would be nothing childish or childlike about it.”

His jaw dropped, and he stared, breathing open-mouthed breaths as ragged as my own.

My head spun, clearly feeling the effects of something more potent than the splash or two of libation that had found its way into the porcelain vessel before me.

Holmes licked his lips once more and whispered, “I would soften my throat to take more and more of you until you were fully sheathed.”

“And suckle.”

“And suckle,” he echoed like a prayer.

Seemingly of their own accord, my hips began to rock minutely in the chair. I dropped my head and closed my eyes, willing my body to stillness, but Holmes—somehow in the darkness—observed my movement and purred in my ear,

“Yes, like that, thrust, fuck my mouth, Watson, shamelessly, wantonly, savagely, even, however your lust craves it. Fill, then stretch my cavity with your thick tumescence.”

I smiled at the ridiculous words that somewhat ridiculous men sometimes utter when their cocks are hard. Then I wasn’t smiling.

“Are you leaking, Watson?”

“As if I’d check something like that, Holmes!” I hissed through clenched teeth.

“The first pearl is the sweetest. It sits on the edge of the tongue—”

“Holmes! This is pure recklessness!”

Our eyes met.

Holmes blinked like a startled bird, then looked away, and I was certain that we were both moments away from shattering our cups from the sheer force with which we gripped them.

“Apologies, Watson.”

“Absolutely none required, my dear man, but if we are to make our way back to the hotel in any comfort at all and,” my lips struggled clumsily around the next word, “retire for night, then we should, perhaps, speak of other matters for a bit.”

“The play?”

“Yes!” I clutched eagerly at the suggestion.

“Salome’s dance? It was Wilde’s invention: ‘ _et les sept voiles_.’”

“Beautiful, but…”

“Yes?”

Holmes leaned forward, such a simple gesture but one that never failed to make my heart swell. To listen is to love.

“It was the sort of thing that a fellow who possesses the imagination of our brilliant playwright but who perhaps has never visited that part of the world he’s describing might invent. Like those fellows in the street who want to sell me the ‘genuine Indian article,’—“

“Unaware that you’re familiar with the genuine Indian article and will not be swayed by their East End imitation?”

“Yes, and unaware of my private philosophy that the genuine Indian articles are best left to the genuine Indians.”

“Odd philosophy for a soldier of  the Empire.”

“That’s why it’s private.”

Holmes laughed and drained his cup. “There is something beguiling about the veils, I agree. ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’”

And, all of a sudden, I wished desperately to be known by Holmes. Images of how my wish might be fulfilled sprang to mind, but then I realised my companion was still speaking.

“…and I daresay there were seven.”

“I’m sorry, seven what?”

“Veils that have fallen since the day we met.”

“Holmes, would you care to elaborate, maybe, on the way to the hotel?”

He tilted his head. “Perhaps it is time we,” he screwed up his lips in imitation of my earlier pronunciation, “retired for the evening. Then, I promise, all shall be revealed.”

I grinned and swore under my breath.

“Tease.”


	2. First and Second Veils

“But Holmes, it’s a bit unfair,” I said as the key jangled into the lock.

I quickly stepped into my hotel room, and I do not err when I refer to it as mine. Holmes had insisted on the extravagance of a pair of adjoining rooms, not swayed in the least by my arguments of economy or that we’d shared a room in country inns and similar establishments all over England without so much as a raised eyebrow. He was not forthcoming about his motive, so I was left to surmise that the distinction between travel for the sake of investigating a crime, no matter the ways in which we often celebrated the successful conclusion of a case, and a genuine holiday, that is, one taken without the urging of a concerned physician, was significant.

“What is unfair?” he asked.

In the few moments of my crossing the threshold and messing about with the key, he’d passed through his own room and divested himself of outwear. Now he was taking my hat and gloves and easing my coat off my shoulders. I was not surprised: he only went about this ritual when he was feeling especially amorous. I’d once accused him of hidden aspirations of being a gentleman’s gentleman. He’d promptly retorted that the only situation in which he’d find a proper placement was the Christmas pantomime at a brothel.

And he was correct, of course, for he stood far too close, looming behind me like a streetlamp, with his breath warming the nape of my neck. He caressed my shoulders and arms with the firm, broad strokes of a masseur-sculpture readying the clay for the first throw upon the wheel. And his gaze, well, it held the heat of an un-kissed kiss, of an opening aching to be breeched, of that first fondle before the cupped palm is filled.

“Veils,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. “You see through everything, everyone at once. How can anything be obscure to the great observer?”

“I’m not omniscient, my dear man, despite what you’ve led the reading public to believe. And, regardless, knowledge that only flows in one direction, and gathers dust on a shelf like an alchemistic receipt, is hardly the basis for intimacy. The first veil was anonymity, which the good Stamford aided us in vanquishing thereof. It was in the laboratory of Barts—”

“If you say that the stars aligned or time stopped or some other nonsense, I shan’t believe you, Holmes. And what’s more, I shall examine you for further signs of delirium.”

“No, I’m afraid your favours were much eclipsed by those of the re-agent which was precipitated by hemoglobin and nothing else, but will you allow for a spark of recognition, that I was in the presence of someone who held greater interest than was my norm, excluding criminal masterminds?”

“I will,” I replied with all the solemnity of a judge acquiescing to the plea from one who has thrown themselves upon the mercy of the court. Then I twisted, the better to see his face.

The heat in his eyes had not diminished.

“Holmes.”

“Then fell the veil of distance when the agreement at cohabitation was reached,” he murmured.

Now we were touching, my shoulder to his chest, and, in truth, I was not thinking of his words he had just uttered, but rather those of earlier that evening, at the café, when he’d confessed the fantasy of my hand at the front of his trousers.

And it suddenly became my fantasy, too.

Not a hand, no, but the short, flat expanse between two knuckles of my curved index finger, drawn down the length of his clothed prick. It was quivering and, I confess, astonishingly hard.

Holmes sucked in a sharp breath. His whole body tensed, and his voice was strained.

“Watson, I had envisioned a thoughtful and articulate wooing…”

He winced, the recoil of a man whose plan of seduction has gone awry, and made to turn away from me.

I understood at once. Coming to crises in one’s trousers may be an arousing thought to many, and indeed, an arousing experience for some, but for Sherlock Holmes, who mostly considered his body a instrument like any other, to be used and abused at will, that the thought would manifest between us was anathema.

I had to act and act quickly if I wanted to salvage the evening and perhaps, the remainder of the holiday.

I made to cover him with my whole hand. He grabbed my wrist and held my hand fast.

“Watson, I am in danger of—“

“Wouldn’t you much rather paint the back of my throat than the inside of your fine Savile Row?”

His eyes widened.

“Here. Now,” I said. “But you must help me to the floor. I am stiff in ways that you are not.”

A boyish smile and he was wrapping his arms around me like an elderly grandfather. We sank together very slowly, but the instant my knees hit the floor, all was haste. His prick was out and pushing, then spurting, between my lips. One of his hands was on my head, the other must have been braced against the wall, for he leaned over me like a storm-bent elm.

I swallowed and licked him clean. He offered me a handkerchief. Mine, I realised, much too late, that the cheeky bugger must’ve plucked from my coat!

“I’m so very grateful that the second veil fell, Watson. Without the proximity that a shared domestic life brings, it’s likely that we would have reverted to being strangers, and that I dare not contemplate.”

“I’m grateful, too, Holmes.” I gave each of his sacs an affectionate nuzzle and lick. “A bit more, while I am here?”

“No,” he said, his tone turning peevish. “I have a thoughtful and articulate wooing—!”

A sharp nip to a less delicate bit of skin silenced him.

“Help me up, you fool,” I said, “or…”

He quickly set himself to rights and reached for me. “…or you’ll have my head on a platter? Seems only fitting.”


	3. Third and Fourth Veils

“The third veil was the veil of convalescence. As you recovered your strength and quietude, I saw a faint outline of the man I would come to know, and know to come,” Holmes added cheekily, “very well. As such, I understood that it was in my interest, if I desired more than just a glimpse of silhouette, to fuss about your proper nourishment and rest.”

We sat opposite each other, he draped at one end of a settee and I in an armchair, with a modest fire in the hearth aside us.

“And here I thought that it was just Mrs. Hudson’s doting nature.”

“Does she dote now?”

It was a good point.

“It was mostly Mrs. Hudson,” he admitted. “But when I spied a choice bit of fruit in the market or crossed in front of the butcher’s—”

“The chops!”

Holmes smiled. “You _do_ like a nice chop.”

“Who doesn’t? Thank you, sir! The first time I saw it on my plate, I could’ve wept. And the buttered parsnips, oh my—but, wait, rest? I don’t recall anything—”

Holmes leaned close and began to hum a melody as near and dear and known to me as a cradle tune.

“Oh, yes, that’s the one that puts me right off to the Land of Nod, doesn’t it? Lovely.” I hummed along with him. “Brahms, you said.”

Holmes huffed. “Brahms, you presumed, and I did not dissuade you. You are musically illiterate, my dear Watson.” He turned away, examining his impeccably groomed fingernails.

“Now see here—“

“Illiterate. Not ignorant, nor insensitive.”

“Fine.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Enlighten me. Who was the composer?”

He cheeks reddened, then he fixed his gaze on hands folded in his lap.

“Oh, Holmes.”

“You paced. You groaned. You thrashed.”

I felt the heat rise in my own cheeks. “Was I really so loud? I had no wish to disturb you. I tried to—”

“You screamed once,” he blurted. He looked up at me, then towards the wall, but not before the firelight had reflected a splash of wetness in his eyes.

Then he sniffed and raised his chin. “It was a challenge that held appeal: fighting Legion with a song. Orpheus, don’t you know? And I never miss a chance to do battle with Death, the Devil, or their miscellany associates. And I made an experiment of it, varying tempos, volumes, rhythms, what I suspected you preferred in your waking moments, what might have been childhood comforts, until I had a song that left you slumbering peacefully in your bed, for more hours than not, more nights than not.”

My world tilted on its axis, as it always does when Holmes makes a revelation, though at one so personal, I noted a degree or two more slant than was the norm.

“You composed a song for me as treatment for shaken nerves and foul dreams,” I said, hearing the undisguised awe in my voice; then, for lack of anything charming to say, I posed a pedantic question.

“What do you call it?”

“Watson’s song. I’m not a poet!”

And at that, I launched myself at him.

I shan’t lie: it was the very opposite of elegant and dashing, what with the awkward angle of impact, the stitch-popping constraints of our clothing, the uncomfortable bodily position in which we—but mostly, he—found ourselves.

Nevertheless, my affection would not be contained.

“You darling man,” I whispered as I looked down upon him and brushed the side of his face with my fingers. “You shall be pet until dawn. I shall have you naked and curled under my arm, stroking and spoiling you all night, whispering treacly endearments most unbecoming to men of our stations, bringing you to crisis when your mind and body desire it, but mostly just keeping you warm and cherished.”

His cheeks reddened once more. “And I should be vexed, wanting to feel the tickle of your breath-praise on the shell of my ear as well as your wet teasing of the delicate, nerve-ridden—”

“—expanse between sacs and hole? Then a bit of arse-worship, my love?” I put my mouth to the side of his neck and drew a circle on with his skin with the tip of my tongue.

He whimpered, then his voice soured a whine. “But my thoughtful and articulate—“

“Do get on with it, then,” I said with a smirk. “Next veil.”

“Well, once your body and mind were on the mend, there was the fourth veil, that of inertia.”

“And how did it fall?”

The weight of me, the press of sharp elbows and knees, must have been paining him, but I remained.

“Inertia’s anecdote is curiosity,” he said.

I laughed. “Oh, my good man! I was curious about you from the moment you perceived Afghanistan in that hospital laboratory! I was curious about your work, your hobbies, and your visitors. I made that list, after all, didn’t I, just to puzzle it all out?”

The mention of that list never failed to bring a smile to his lips.

“Yes, and I was patient, allowing for regain of strength and bearing, waiting for a case to illustrate who I was and who you might—only might, my dear Watson—be, and then it arrived.”

“And I abandoned my invalid’s stupor.”

“And we were in motion together for the first time.”

“And it was extraordinary.”

“Indeed, and then you offered to record the case. Though I feigned indifference, I was struck, speechless, breathless, by the notion. I had not considered that role for you until then and yet it was a perfect one. And the days and cases passed, and greater understanding and appreciation followed, as well as greater intimacy until…”

“Yes, well,” I said gruffly, retreating to the armchair.

Holmes sat up, smoothing and straightening his clothes.

And thus, our holiday ardour was in once more in jeopardy, but this time, I was at a loss as to how to salvage it.


	4. The Fifth Veil

By the time Holmes’s suggestion of a scandalous holiday to attend a scandalous play written by a scandalous playwright was a welcome one, I knew three things: one, that I loved Holmes; two, that I had loved my wife; and three, that if ever directly questioned I would apologise to no one, living or dead, for loving either of them.

But that was all I knew.

The rest was a tangled mass of coloured-yarn questions and the more I tugged on one strand to free it, the more knotted my thoughts and feelings became. If I had truly understood the depth and nature of Holmes’s feelings prior to my marriage, if he had confessed himself plainly, would I have reciprocated? What would have happened then? What if all had been revealed during my marriage? Why had I, a man of the world, not realised it myself? Was there any moment in the past when such a revelation or realisation might have bent my path so that it would, in time, rejoin with this one? And what moment would that have been? Or were there a host of other Watsons following other paths, living and dying and loving and breaking hearts in realms that exist largely in that sliver between wakefulness and sleep?

I did not know.

I did not know if I would ever know.

I did not know what purpose it served to know or not know.

Or why I kept picking at it like a scab.

“Like the cloak of Caesar.”

Holmes had drawn the low table away and was now kneeling before me with my hands in his.

“What?” I asked, startled from my musing.

“Wine from the Island of Samothrace, purple like the cloak of Caesar.”

“Ah, from the play, the Tetrarch’s wines.”

“Wine from Cyprus as yellow as gold,” Holmes continued.

“’I love gold,’” I recited.

“Wine from Sicily as red as blood. This is how I love you, my dear Watson. Like a monarch, like a treasure, like the very flow of life.”

I should have been reveling in my lover’s adoring words, but I wasn’t. I was pondering just how long and deep and damaged was the root of such a love that bore so poetic a fruit.

“I love you, too, Holmes, but something in me keeps, rather inconveniently, wanting to make sense of the past; to untangle all the threads and re-weave them into a tapestry scene, or at least a pattern, that I recognise; to impose some order, some logic upon the chaos.”

“Dear God, man, if _you_ desire order and logic, don’t you think that I, who live and breathe and earn my daily bread by them, share that desire, desire it a thousand-fold more?! Do you think that my own questions—can they be very much different from yours—don’t haunt me?! With all brutal fairness and cruel honesty, at whose feet shall we lay the blame that _the fifth veil was a shroud?!_ ”

The last was a strident roar.

He stood, and when he spoke again, his voice was dirge.

“I shall never know, Watson, if mourning me is not a prior requisite for loving me.”

I stared at his shirted back and blinked to dispel the pinch of tears. “Nor shall I, but I do, love you, that is, Holmes, no matter how it came about.” I reached out and brushed his hanging fingertips. “You were so very brave, my dear man, to lay yourself bare like. It was far braver than dancing nude for a king or kissing a dead man’s lip in front of a crowd of strangers who have paid handsomely for the privilege of gawking.”

“I consoled myself with the notion that my grave soil was still so freshly turned that either, or both, of us could have me re-interred should my revelation be an unwelcome one, but,” he looked over his shoulder, “I did have a sense that you were different somehow, that your reaction might not be adverse. Part of me thought it was my foolish hope creating its own delusion.”

I smiled and said nothing.

Then Holmes addressed the fire; he spoke quickly and far too casually, “I suppose grief changes a man.”

It is rare that I impart wisdom to Holmes that calls positive attention to the difference in our ages, but I do confess a bit of selfish glee when the moment arises.

I leaned forward and laced his fingers in mine.

“Holmes, I speak with authority when I say it is not the blow that changes a man, or a woman, or anyone, but rather how that blow is taken and most importantly, what happens next, how, or if, the grieving one survives.”

“If you had died, Watson…”

He crumpled back at my feet and I wondered, and not for the first time, how a man so very long can fold himself so very small.

“You would have died, too,” I said, stroking his head. “At least the part of you that speaks of love and wine in the same breath and quotes scandalous playwrights.”

He looked up. “That moment…”

Need I provide the reference for ‘that’?

No?

Good.

I was still holding one of his hands in mine. My other hand was still petting him.

“At your prolonged silence and stillness, I was tempted to examine you for signs of affliction, seizure.”

He shrugged off the attempt at levity. “The shroud fell. And from death and from mercy—or forgiveness?”

“A bit of both, I suppose, and it flowed both ways.”

“—came a new life.”

I nodded. “But, Holmes…?”

“Yes?”

I frowned. “Does that make you Jesus?”

He snorted. “Would you prefer Lazarus?”

I kissed his fingers and smiled. “I’d prefer you get on with it because I suspect that the next veil is going to be an interesting one.”

He leaned up and kissed my lips. “If by ‘interesting,’ you mean…”

“Scandalous?” I suggested with a smirk.

“…then you are correct. _On y va_. The veil of courtship.”


	5. The Sixth Veil

“The veil of courtship,” I mused. “Is there anything more inebriating than the flush of new love?”

The memory of those first torrid couplings with Holmes remained near and dear to my heart and vivid in my mind.

He and I had been—were, in fact—consummately discrete in our public lives, so barring the exchange of a heated glance across the breakfast table or one knee brushing another in a cab, ours was a private romance conducted largely behind well-bolted doors.

That was making this journey, with its space and its freedom, all the lovelier for its singularity.

“Is there anything more seductive than a performance of one for an audience of one?” I continued. “The stage lost a fine performer when you became a specialist in crime—the high stage, as well as a few of the lower ones, my dear man.”

I raised my eyebrows and shot him a look. I was reclined on the bed, propped up on my elbows.

He was undressing slowly before me.

“Watson.”

There might have been an undercurrent of warning in his magnificent growl, but I would not be deterred. In the time that it had taken us to shift from the sitting area of my half of the hotel suite to the bed of his, I had decided to give voice to my thoughts as they surfaced. After all, we were not in Baker Street, not even in England. Wilde’s words had crossed the Channel to be read aloud, why should I not celebrate that triumph of art by silencing my own internal censor, if only for the night?

Whether Holmes already knew what I was going to say, whether he could deduce it in the moment, was inconsequential. I desired to speak my mind, my heart, my loins, to put it floridly; to express in my own sincere, though inelegant, phrasing—

And, suddenly, it occurred to me—readers of _The Strand_ will not be surprised at how embarrassingly late in this tale that this awareness surfaced—that I may have stumbled upon Holmes’s original motivation for our visit.

Holmes paused his divesting to smirk and growl once more.

“Ah, Watson.”

“The way you say my name,” I said.

“The way you look at me,” he countered quickly.

Our words were playing cards thrown down between us.

“The way you smile.”

“The way you laugh.”

“Your hands.”

“Your tongue.”

“Your prick.”

“ _Your_ prick.”

I raked my eyes up and down his bare chest.

“You are handsome when you’re dressed, you’re beautiful when you’re not, but, damn it, Holmes, you are most sinful when you are somewhere in-between. The lover emerging, shedding his worldly skin.”

He leaned forward, placing his hands on either side of me on the bed. “When you are spent, Watson, sated, cleaned and curled between your pillows, in those few delicious moments before sleep, you are so soft, so warm, so pliant, so wholly entrancing, that its force surpasses that of the strongest opiate ever to have had the misfortune of traveling through my veins. I confess a near irresistible urge to—“

His cheeks reddened, and I did not need to be the world’s greatest sleuth-hound to track his statement to its conclusion.

“You may give into the urge here, open me, take me, press me into these fine sheets,” I said.

I’ll admit it wasn’t an act which held much allure under normal circumstances, but here, in a foreign bed in a foreign city with the foreign verse of a jailed poet still ringing in my ears, convention and preference seemed a rough sea away.

Then a second realisation dawned.

“Holmes, did you bring me all the way to Paris just to mount me?”

The colour in his cheeks deepened. He looked away.

“Men of means have done far more for far less,” was his mumbled reply.

“But first,” he looked back and spoke quickly, confidently, in the manner of a magician before the reveal, “your seduction.”

“I’m already seduced,” I argued as he stripped to his drawers. “Or hadn’t you observed?” I palmed the bulge at the front of my trousers.

I moved my hand as he bent to press his lips to the straining fabric.

“Mind and spirit, too,” he murmured cryptically. “But, oh, how the flesh tempts…”

The last phrase was strained, and I knew its significance as just as I knew a woman was gravid by the way she threw her head back to nap on a morning train.

I freed my erection, and Holmes began to make tender love to the head, glans and slit, then took more and more of the shaft, suckling hungrily.

I watched him.

Then I leaned to one side and reached down, brushing his hair aside, giving me a much better view of the wanton display. He was so greedy in his lust, and yet so skilled in his ministration, both nymph and courtesan in one, were it possible, even more myth-shrouded creature.

My breath was reduced to pants; I could only manage a hoarse, “How you undo me!”

My body tightened. My hips lifted almost imperceptibly. My cock jerked. I was teetering on the edge.

And then I wasn’t.

“Holmes?”

He wrenched himself from me abruptly and stood.

“Mind,” he said, reaching for the jar of unguent nested in the bedding.

“My mind—what little remains—is yours!” I cried in frustration.

I sat up on the edge of the bed. He coated one hand with slick and straddled me, wrapping his fist around my shaft.

“But if I confess, for example, ‘ _Ta voix était un encensoir qui répandait d’étranges parfums, et quand je te regardais j’entendais une musique étrange!_ ’?”

His words, the music of them in that husky, lust-soaked baritone, went straight to my groin.

I groaned. “Oh, you bloody son of—!“

“Son of a sister of Vernet?” he teased. Then he dropped his voice once more, “ _J’ai soif de ta beauté.  J’ai faim de ton corps.  Et ni le vin, ni les fruits ne peuvent apaiser mon désir_.”

At this, I giggled, like the shameless coquette that I am.

Holmes bit my neck playfully, then kissed the teeth-pinched spots. “Your music, my dear Watson, holds me as spellbound as mine does you.”

I pulled back.

“ _Ni les fleuves ni les grandes eaux, ne pourraient éteindre ma passion_ ,” he recited.

“I believe every word.”                                                                                                 

“You should.”

“You charm me so, like in those first days.”

“It has become my principle vocation as I now agree with the playwright: ‘ _le mystère de l’amour est plus grand que le mystére de la mort_.’”

I stared into those grey eyes.

“Just when I think that I cannot love you more, Holmes—“

But at that moment, my body made its neglected needs known; the hand around my prick had been still for far, far too long.

“Holmes, please,” I pleaded. “I love you. I’m yours. All the poetry later. Right now, I’m aching for something much baser.”

He smiled.

“High or low, I’ll deny you nothing. Come, Watson.”

Three tugs of that hand made of those marvelous, marvelous finger, and I was spent.

* * *

“So?” I asked when I was clean and nude and once more stretched out on the bed, inching towards an inviting bank of pillows arranged at the head of the bed.

Holmes was still in his drawers.

“The third act,” he said.

“That wasn’t—?”

“There’s still your spirit, my good man.”

I frowned.

He stepped backwards away with his arms wide. When he’d almost reached the far wall, he stopped, then jumped.

“HOLMES!”

His hands were on the floor, his feet in the air, his long body curved, moving stiltedly, but steadily, towards the bed.

He laughed.

And danced.

On his hands.

Towards me.

For me.

Well, there was nothing for it but to clap and shout and sing his praises most incoherently.

When he neared the bed, he leapt back onto his feet, head high, eyes shining with triumph, mouth stretched in a wide grin.

“You astound me!” I shouted when speech finally returned.

He bowed, drinking in a second round of applause.

“That is a very important element of our courtship, is it not?” he said shyly, but his face was lit with a proud joy. “The veil may have fallen, but I will always long to fill you with that very characteristic wonder of yours.”

“And I shall never cease to be awed. But have you always known how to do that?”

“No, it’s recent acquisition, my dear man. I heard Wilde’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ was inspired by a Romanian circus performer. I was intrigued and, on a whim, managed to find the very one, and, after clearing up a small matter of an inheritance left to her by an old aunt, she agreed to give me a few lessons. I’ve been practicing ever since.”

I shook my head, then my eyes widened.

“Mrs. Hudson’s lamps!”

“Yes, all three, lamentably, casualties of my practise.”

Neither of us could stop smiling.

Finally, I said,

“Consider my spirit seduced, my hand won. Now, strip, come here, and have your wicked way with me, enchantress.”

One quick stoop and he was naked, diving head-first into bed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holmes is quoting _Salome_ , Salome's penultimate speech.
> 
>  
> 
> _Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music._
> 
>  
> 
>  _I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire._
> 
>  
> 
> _Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion._
> 
>  
> 
> _...the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death._


	6. The Seventh Veil

I kissed Holmes. He kissed me.

And there in the quiet shadows of the hotel room, cradled in his arms, forming the more blasphemous half of a Pietà, I had all the time in the world, all the freedom in the world, to indulge in as many gentle demonstrations of affection as I desired.

“We could extend our stay,” he suggested.

I groaned. “No more than a day, Holmes, or the temptation to descend into permanent and abject hedonism will be too great and we’ll find ourselves in position of our learned playwright.”

“True. Also, the criminal classes of London would rejoice and our friends at Scotland Yard would be exhausted to the point of purposelessness.”

He kissed my cheeks, the tip of my nose, and my eyelids. I traced the landscape of his face with my fingertips, then rubbed his bottom lip with my thumb. He took the pad of my thumb in his mouth and sucked.

Our movements were slow, deliberate, telegraphed seemingly hours in advance. From my position, I could kiss and lick and nip at one side of his neck. I curled an arm up, weaving the fingers of one hand into his hair, which was lank, slicked, but soft as a newborn’s.

Without breaking our kiss, he took my hand in his and brought it down, the better, I quickly realised, to caress the right side of my chest. He flicked my right nipple with his thumb, then bent his head to lick.

“Holmes.”

He knew all my weaknesses and all the parts of me that craved his touch. The ridiculous notion he might suckle the remainder of the night, drive me to madness, and crisis, over and over from just this one act flitted across my mind.

I moaned his name again when he ceased his laving and began to apply the raw scrape of teeth.

At the waves of pleasure-pain, my cock stirred anew. I pulled his head down. My chest arched up to meet his mouth, but far too soon teeth and hard sucking had softened back to sweet licks.

I whimpered when Holmes pulled away. Cool air on the wet, pebbled bud made me shiver as did his impassioned declaration.

“I’d damn the jezail bullet that stole this delicious sensitivity from your left side, Watson, but as it also brought you, through horridly circuitous route, to me, I suppose it’s not entirely without redemption.”

I had no time—or faculty, frankly—to form a reply, for no sooner had he spoke than his mouth was covering mine.

I rose slightly in his lap, and his hands lighted on either side of my head as mine did his. Our heads tilted; our lips pressed against each other; our tongues touched and touched and touched. The kiss was deep and claiming and seemingly endless, for our lips never parted, they just slowed, then resumed their feasting.

I was drunk. I was mad. I wanted him so very badly, needed him more.

“Holmes.” My voice was raw and cracked when I whispered in his ear. “Do whatever you desire. Wring me limp with the taking. Bruise me, batter me. Christ, I don’t care. I just want you in me, on me. Now. Do you understand? Now, love.”

A panic gripped me, and I clutched his sweat-damp body to mine with all my strength.

Did he understand? Did he? This was not play or banter or cleverness. This wasn’t mystery or poetry.

I needed him. Now.

He shushed me, then slid his hands down my back to grip my arse and shift our lower halves that I might straddle him. Our cocks brushed and my hips bucked involuntarily.

“Like a common bastard, I lured you here to bugger you,” he blurted when I looked down into his half-lidded eyes.

“Then get on with it!” I roared and bit at his mouth petulantly.

* * *

The haste for which I begged was not to be, naturally.

Holmes stretched me slowly and gently, and though I appreciated the care, even more so later than in the moment, the whole business might have been somewhat tedious without the conversation that accompanied it.

“You’d think that with your fascination with my hands—an attraction that may not have escaped your more astute and worldly readership, my dear Boswell—this,” said Holmes as he teased my rim with two greased fingers, “would be a recurrent request.”

“Speed, space, hygiene—oh, dear God.”

He’d begun to probe, of course.

“Frigging like a soldier, fretting like a doctor, but don’t distress yourself, my dear Watson, I am accustomed to manipulating fragile philosophical instruments—or so you say.”

I chuckled. “Extraordinary delicacy of touch.”

He hummed.

Then I felt his weight shift on the bed and a warm, wet palm was cupping my bollocks as fingertips continued to stretch my rim.

“Oh, I like this,” I said eagerly, tilting forward to push into the fondling hand, arching back to impale myself just a bit more on those long, elegant digits.

“Because you are, my love,” teeth pinched skin, his, mine, but where precisely on my body I’ll never be able to say with any certainty, “a bit of a tart.”

“Not ‘a bit,’ my good man, ‘quite a bit.’ After all, my past does span a goodly portion of the globe—oh, Holmes, could you, ah—?”

His fingers plunged deeper. My breath caught, my body tensed, fighting the intrusion.

“Watson?”

I heard the concern in his voice, but could only nod. His next words were mercifully distracting.

“It’s disconcerting. It’s humbling. I am, at once, grateful, envious, and jealous of your past, Watson. You would not be the lover that you are without it, were that I could match your experience, your skill—“

“My dear Holmes, you are skilled beyond—” I interrupted, but a twist of his fingers, and the burn it produced, silenced me.

“—but may the Devil take all those who have had you like this, seen you like this!”

“My dear man, no one has ever whisked me away to foreign parts just to sod me, well, not literally, I suppose her Majesty’s government did achieve that result in a rather metaphorical fashion but—oh, dear God,” he was stroking my shaft now, “besides that, no one sees what you see, no one. I believe our whole enterprise rests on that particular fact.”

“Perhaps” and a kiss to my shoulder was his only response.

* * *

“Look at this beautiful hole, begging to be breeched,” he said, running one finger ‘round my gaping hole. His voice was sinfully warm and wonderful, but I was none too pleased about being left dangling on the precipice of release—twice—without satisfaction.

“Now’s not the time for speeches, Holmes! Fuck me! Now!”

“It’s always time for speeches, Watson, but, yes, I think I shall.”

I bit my lip to stifle whatever shameful noise might have escaped.

Cockhead.

Cockhead was not fingers.

“How long have you wanted this?”

I was searching for another distraction, now from the demands of my own prick as well as his.

“I’ve dreamt of you like this, beneath me, yielding to me, since our first fumbling, but, as you say, our beds, our rooms, our lives, our times, it’s decidedly inconvenient.” He sank deeper. “But you feel so good, Watson, so gloriously tight and welcoming—“

I huffed and wriggled my hindquarters. “Good to know my whorish ways satisfy.”

He moaned and ran his hands up and down my lower back and buttocks. “Are you, Watson?” he teased in a low voice. “Are you my little whore?”

The absurdity of the scene and his words struck me, and I giggled.

And at that, he quickly thrust until he was fully-sheathed.

“Oh, God, Watson.”

“Yes!” I laughed. “I’m your whore. You’ve bought and paid, haven’t you? Now, ride me, you common bastard!”

“Fuck, you’re made to be ridden,” he said, drawing his prick out slightly, then slamming it right back into me, full hilt.

I was soon rocking my hips in rhythm with his thrusting, which grew faster and harder until all I could hear was the obscene slaps of skin-on-skin and his low chant of my name. He gave one final violent thrust, and his full weight collapsed atop me.

“ _John_.”

I was startled out of my lust-fog.

“ _I lied. Since the beginning. I wanted to throw you over that lab table at Barts and bugger you senseless to celebrate my twin discoveries: finding you and finding that bloody reagent. Fuck! From the very first_. _I’m sorry. I’m so bloody sorry._ ”

I struggled for breath. _“I love you…”_ I paused and licked my lips. The word I wanted would not form. I grunted in frustration and started anew. _“I love you, you monstrous beast. You’re a crime against some unknown God, but I love you, body, mind, spirit. Let them put out the torches, hide the moon, hide the stars—“_

Holmes cried out, then sank his teeth into my shoulder.

* * *

His cock lay buried in me far longer than was prudent.

Upon pulling out, awkwardly and with a bit of wincing on both our parts, he flopped onto his back on the bed beside me.

I immediately reached for the unguent and slicked my cock, which would no longer be denied.

“Come on me,” he slurred. “Come on my face.” He batted his own brow with a clumsy paw. “ _Ici_ , _si vous plait.”_

“No.”

Holmes pouted as I decorated his chest with streams of seed, then laughed a drunken laugh.

“Well done. You allow me far too many liberties, my Watson.”

“I suppose it’s Paris. _Liberté, égalité, fraternité_. All that.”

He snorted, then his expression sobered. “Perhaps, but this is strange brotherhood, my good man,” he said with a frown.

I considered the mess before me and the mess dripping from me and was forced to agree.

“Indeed. It must gain something in the translation.”

* * *

Once clean, we slept curled together like cats, only waking to offer a hand or a mouth to a needy prick or to murmur syrupy endearments in an ear or write them with fingertip upon skin. We rose at noon and had a sumptuous luncheon and then took an afternoon ramble about the city.

A beautiful day, but as the sun began to set, my feet slowed.

“Holmes…?”

“Home, Watson?”

I nodded.

And that’s how we found ourselves on the Night Ferry that very evening, but it wasn’t until we were ensconced in comfortable seats, each with a stack of evening papers awaiting perusal, that I remembered it.

“Seven! There were seven veils!”

“Yes?”

I leaned towards him. “So, tell me, when did the seventh one fall?”

“Oh, that. Two Sundays ago.”

I stared and cast my mind back as Holmes continued,

“We had that huge row because in my distraction about that smuggling case, I smoked all of that very fine tobacco you won playing darts at your club. You stormed out, slamming the door behind you.”

“I remember Mrs. Hudson gave me a very disapproving look for the latter, but I was furious!”

Holmes hummed. “But I knew you’d return and I knew it didn’t diminish the depth of your feeling for me in any way. I knew it. In my bones. I knew it with every fibre of my being in a way that I hadn’t until then. The veil of doubt.” He made a flourish with his hand.

I blinked. My mouth fell open. And as I shook my head, the word slipped out as smoothly and effortlessly as a skipping stone across a still pond.

“ _Sherlock_.”

His eyes widened. His gaze softened. One corner of his mouth rose in a half-smile, and he gave a minute nod of the head, which I returned.

A long, mournful whistle of the train interrupted our silent communion.

Holmes looked out the window and coughed. I sniffed and glanced at the door.

Then we each reached for a newspaper and spent the rest of our journey in silence and—and here I can only speak for myself—grinning madly behind the rustling curtain of ink and page.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
